With the development of computer network technologies, the conventional cash payment mode has been gradually replaced with online banking for its convenience and availability. The so-called “online banking” is carried out on the Internet to provide financial services to the customers. The customers can almost complete any banking transactions online, such as inquiring account affairs, transferring, trading foreign exchange, shopping online, or registering the lost card, instead of laboriously going to counter of a bank. By online banking, the efficiency is improved for both the customers and the bank, and the cost is cut off at the same time.
The conventional payment uses cash. It is neither convenient nor safe to carry a lot of cashes. Therefore, the electronic wallet comes out. The electronic wallet is a software application used for secure electronic transactions and preservation of transaction history. The electronic wallet has such features as
1) managing electronic security credentials, for example, requesting, saving, or deleting an electronic security credential;
2) securing electronic transactions, for example, authenticating the customer and transmitting transaction information upon conducting a transaction; and
3) saving transaction history, for example, saving a record of a transaction for later inquiry; or encrypting and transmitting and verifying for validity account information (e.g. the account number and expiration date) and payment instructions when shopping online.
The process of use of the electronic wallet consists of registering an electronic wallet, adding a bank card, and bank card payment. It centralizes the management of different electronic currencies, credit cards, and personal information card, etc. The electronic wallet is secure and convenient without the need of storing personal information on a personal computer. The customer can complete a transaction online in less than 20 seconds.
The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is an infrastructure created with the public key theory and technology for providing security services. The customer can carry out secure electronic transactions, communications, and other activities on the Internet with services provided by the PKI platform. In PKI technology, certificates are used for managing public keys, and the public keys of a customer are associated with his other identification information by the Certificate Authority, a third-party trusted authority, for authenticating the customer over the Internet. Currently, the confidentiality, the authenticity, the integrity, and the non-repudiation of information transmission are maintained by encrypting and signing the digital information to be transmitted using digital certificates based on the PKI. The PKI is a set of software and hardware relating to create, issue, manage, and revoke a public key certificate. The core element of the PKI is the digital certificate, and the core implementer of the PKI is the CA.
The regular carrier of the electronic wallet is the smart card, which is also known as the Integrated Card (IC). A customer may have many smart cards to conduct different transactions, so that a loading process sometimes is needed. The so-called “loading” means to recharge the smart card with fund from a personal account.
At present, the holder of the smart card often has to go to a specified site to recharge the card. It is, to some extent, not convenient to use the electronic wallet (e.g. time and energy consuming). If the customer did not complete loading for some reason, some important information (e.g. actual amount received) cannot be updated in time. As a result, the customer may still not conduct a transaction. In prior art, the loading transaction of online banking is done by the intranet on the bank side. A secure and reliable method for conducting the loading operation by a public network has not been developed yet.